As the I.P. Johnson Director of the Bioacoustics Research Program (BRP) I oversee and direct a vigorous, multi-disciplinary program that is actively engaged in both basic and applied research. In some ways it is difficult to clearly distinguish between my specific activities and those of BRP`s professional staff. As in last year`s report, here I have included only those activities that I specifically have been directly responsible for. Thus, for example, this report does not include training, workshops, manuals or public outreach that BRP`s staff have accomplished in the past year. It does not include the manuals and technical information documents that the BRP posts on our website. How those accomplishments get credited to CALS seems a legitimate question.

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Research

research overview

Bioacoustic bird monitoring continues to expand and improve through a wide variety of collaborations. Projects include migratory bird monitoring on DOD installations, noise effects on endangered bird species, rare bird monitoring, miniaturized radio tracking transmitters and advanced radio tracking receiver networks.
Scientific conservation research on a variety of large whale species continues throughout the world's oceans. A new collaborative effort with the NOAA Sanctuary Program is underway off the east coast. PhD students Danielle Cholewiak and Renata Sousa-Lima completed their final field projects on humpback whales off Mexico and Brasil, respectively. PhD student Mya Thompson (forest elephants) is teaching in local public schools this year. Post-docs Sofie Van Parijs accepted the job of bioacoustics scientist at NOAA-NMFS in Woods Hole, and Susan Parks will become a research associate at Penn State in August. The research analyst team of Melissa Fowler, Dimitri Ponirakis, Ann Warde, Chris Tessaglia-Hymes and Liz XXX has accomplished magic to keep up with the heavy demands of data processing, and they continue to learn valuable skills.

Service

outreach overview

BRP is working to successfully enable and implement the CLO's new Strategic Plan, in particular the challenges of "going global" and making our varied "products" available to the world at large. The hardware production facility has doubled in the last six months. BRP scientists continue to conduct scientific and applied research projects around the globe on a diversity of species. These efforts are directed toward understanding what-where-when-and-why species are present in an area, often with an underlying motivation to determine the impacts of human activities on individuals and populations over large spatial and temporal scales. Such ambitious undertakings are enabled by a growing suite of customized data collection and analysis systems designed and fabricated by our teams of hardware and software engineers, and tested by our team of research analysts. The active recognition of passive acoustic monitoring as a critical tool for habitat assessment, management, mitigation and monitoring by federal agencies, state agencies, NGOs and industry, heralds the arrival of opportunities and challenges for BRP and the CLO.